A Life Well Lived

March

Me Pat, Doreen and Shirley Marshall after the Whit Walks.

It must have been a March when I discovered nature; down Calverley Woods I spotted dozens of trees with little pale greenish yellow tassles hanging from the branches: I loved them but Mother was not able to identify these catkins  nor the name of the tree, Hazel of course.  This was the start of my love affair with nature and the first of many many visits to the local woods.  It became my playground, one that I would visit whenever I could persuade someone to take me in my early childhood.  Later, I had an old bike and, armed with a packed lunch consisting of a jam sandwich wrapped in Mothers’s Pride waxed paper and a bottle of liquorice water, ( a 2inch stick of liquorice placed in an old pop bottle filled with water and shaken vigourously) , my newly made friends and I would ” go out to play”.  We would make dens and explore, one day finding a disused quarry, we later salvaged a good stout rope from somewhere and created a  swing out over the quarry:  taking it in turns to either push or be pushed out over into the open air above the quarry.  We had no knowledge of knots, we just tied the rope to a suitable tree and hoped! I cannot remember ever telling anyone where we were going, we were just” laikin out” and by some miracle always got home safely in time for tea.

My Sister Joan’s birthday was in March but I can never remember any celebrations for it. On one such birthday, she was confiding to me  about her need of a vase: I cannot remember us having anything as frivolous as a vase ( I mean, what were they for?), but Joan said ” I’d LOVE a vase then I could put flowers in it”. She was married with two children by then, living in a two up/ two down house, no garden with a privvy across the road. So no hope of flowers in my mind, but by a bit of judicious saving ie walking home from Grammar School and keeping the bus fare, I managed the following year, to buy my beloved sister a pottery jug/ vase from Pudsey Market for 1/11d.  I never did see any flowers in it but it was displayed for many years to come.

Ben, new spine together with a cherry pavlova

March 2020 was a traumatic month; Ben was due for spinal surgery. When I have surgery I’m brave, no fuss. However having the son and heir operated on is another thing altogether … His spinal fusion was in two parts; first op through the front door to place a cage around the injured spine, the second via the back to fill the cage with artificial bone. First one seemed a doddle and,  once healed he had the second half of the operation. Rebecca and I arranged to visit him the following morning but the surgeon phoned me in the early hours to say Ben was out of theatre but they had had some trouble getting an effective cocktail of drugs to ease his pain. He said not to visit Ben until the afternoon to ensure he got some sleep. When we arrived I tentatively knocked Bens door, told to enter and there was Ben standing up grinning from ear to ear! I had had the same operation forty years earlier and was bedridden, flat on my back for three weeks before being fitted with a full body cast. Unbelievable but so, so relieved.